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Yes, sometimes the artist does. I went to some lovely places in the past few months. Like when I fed this rhino
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at the amazing White
Oak Conservation Center. My dear
friend Colleen Keegan, one of the brilliant creators of the Creative Capital Professional Development Program
brought me to visit this amazing place.
Philanthropist Howard Gilman made White Oak a home for two geniuses he
came to admire: Mikhail Baryshnikov, who based his White Oak Dance Project in
this beautiful studio
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and conservation biologist John Lukas, who has created the
premiere rare animal conservation center in this hemisphere. It's astonishing. We had dinner with John and his wife. And we got to meet this ridiculously
cute baby rhino, so adorable I'm gonna spring for a second rhino photo:
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Sixty endangered species are bred at White Oak and studied
as part of a global effort connecting zoos, animal sanctuaries, and land
conservation efforts. And right
next door, experimental dance artists create new work.
Nice.
After that, I headed to Camp Choconut for the
wedding of David Brick and Maiko Matshushima.
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Then I headed to a dune shack
in Provincetown, MA, for a week long solo artist retreat. They drive you through these huge dunes
that look like this
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until you get to this shack
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where I spent a lot of time writing
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because the shack has no electricity. So no laptop. Writing with a pencil is different. You have to plan more. You can't just spew some nonsense and
then clean it up. A great practice
for me.
I had never taken an artist retreat by myself. God, why not? Headlong has had some wonderful retreats, and they are
always big noisy affairs with lots of people and schedules and rehearsal
spaces. This was just me and a
two-room shack and a lot of silence. It took about a day to really come to rest. But then I did.
It was amazing. Please remind me to do this every year.
The last natural place I went was right off the tip of
Manhattan.
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Governor's Island is well worth the 800-yard ferry ride from
Manhattan. The Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council hosted a five day Creative Capital workshop for 50 New York
artists. I taught on two of the
days and the artists were fired up.
They were ready to change the world, and it was a beautiful thing to be
a part of.
That's one of the things I spend my time doing, traveling
with some hilarious other artists like this one and this one around the
country, teaching artists how to build sustainable lives. In Philadelphia, I do it in a program I
started called Artist U that offers a year of planning and professional development to 12 local artists
each year. Here we are at last
year's graduation in June:
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Sorry JJ, I cut you
off on the bottom there.
Artists can have a pretty rough ride. I've spent a lot of time with a lot of
people in the last five years thinking about why that is and about how that
might change. There's a nice
interview with Ruby Lerner here about Creative capital's approach. And I also like the thinking of these folks.
Artists U is planning an expansion to two new cities and
that has me thinking a lot about scale. Funders are obsessed with it these days: what are the best
practices? How can we get "to
scale," i.e. replicate a program to an extent that it will have broad, national
impact?
So I got stuck on this thought, deep in my dune shack solo:
there is a lot of arrogance in the ambition that I (and others) have for
Impact. We want to change things
thoroughly, permanently, broadly, immediately.
I saw an announcement today: a group wants to get "health
insurance for every artist by 2014." A nice sound bite, but what does that thinking really
do to us? So now, back in the
urban jungle, I am trying to combine my ambition with a little more balance.
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There was a square of sunlight in the
dune shack. In the middle of the day it was on the floor, and then it
crawled slowly up the wall till sunset. It was the closest thing I had
to a clock. I made dinner when it was chest high on the wall. And I
went out to watch the end of the sunset when it turned orange near the
ceiling.
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Are you still reading?
How nice of you! Here's
your bonus track: Someone made a
movie about us, a documentary you can see on September 13 . One night only! This is the picture to promote the
movie, and it captures Headlong in our very first Philadelphia studio in 1993.
Some things I notice: how high Amy wore her pants, and how
low I wore mine.
And we shared the studio (at 20th and Snyder) with a band
who kept changing their name. For
a while they were called Naked Culture and you can see it spray painted on the
right there.
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much love,
Andrew Simonet
Headlong Dance Theater
 
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